Arc is still a work in progress. We’ve done little more than take a snapshot of the code and put it online.

I’ve working on this for a long, long time and realized I’ll never get it done properly so I’ll release it anyway.

Why release it now? Because, as I suddenly realized a couple months ago, it’s good enough.

It’s shit but I’m famous enough that people will be talking about it for a long time. People will think it’s good even if it’s really just a bunch of macros on top of Scheme.

I worry about releasing it, because I don’t want there to be forces pushing the language to stop changing.

I’m not going to change it, but if you idiot enought to want to use it, remember that there’s not documention. In other words, don’t call me if you can understand a single line of the code.

Which is why, incidentally, Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. (…) But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.

I don’t understand and don’t care for any other character set other than my precious ASCII. I learned it forty years ago and I’m not giving it up now. No way. Ah, that why Yahoo! completely rewrote the application I sold them. Bunch of losers.

Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.

Also, I don’t understand anything about new and modern standards and technologies like XHTML and CSS. And I’m not waste my precious VC time learning them. And I don’t care about you people who dare to make the Web less complicated. Did I mention why Yahoo! had to rewrite the program they bought from me?

Tables are the lists of html. The W3C doesn’t like you to use tables to do more than display tabular data because then it’s unclear what a table cell means.

I told you. I don’t understand anything about HTML.

So experience suggests we should embrace dirtiness. Or at least some forms of it; in other ways, the best quick-and-dirty programs are usually quite clean.

Look! A dumpster! Let’s have some fun!

Arc tries to be a language that’s dirty in the right ways. It tries not to forbid things, for example. (…) For now, best to say it’s a quick and dirty language for writing quick and dirty programs.

I lost so much time with this shit that the world should share my pain. Basic, watch yourself. It’s Arc time! Agora é a vez do Arc.